Grants for Adams County programs targeting poor and at-risk mothers were drying up, and organizers were scrambling to find new funding.

Then, this fall, a trio of home-visiting programs in a county battling child poverty and higher-than-average rates of abuse got a $520,000 life raft as part of a larger federal grant to Colorado.

That helped buoy the program that sends trained professionals into the homes of 200 new moms, teaching them everything from proper nutrition to baby-proofing.

“We were looking at a cliff,” said Angela Rothermel, director of the Early Childhood Partnership of Adams County. “It was very fortunate that we were able to sustain those programs.”

The state got $736,000 total for Adams and Pueblo counties from the federal Health Resources and Services Administration, which is set to send additional money to rural counties in south central and southeast Colorado by the summer.

As groups in those counties put the money to work, state officials are gearing up to ask for millions more in competitive grants to expand similar programs in Denver and Morgan counties.

The strategy is to invest in very young and at-risk kids before they are born, before they fall behind in kindergarten and before they are at risk for abuse or neglect.

Two programs, the Nurse Family Partnership and Parents as Teachers, focus on prenatal, first-time mothers and work with kids until they’re toddlers. A third — Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters — focuses on the pre-kindergarten set.

Referrals come from clinics and aid offices.

The federal money means researchers can collect data nationwide and track the effects that home visits have on early development, school readiness and childbirth, said Mary Martin, director of home-visitation programs for Colorado’s Department of Public Health.

“It’s pretty exciting to see what kind of impact we can have by focusing in on these highest-risk communities,” Martin said. “We might start seeing a generation of kids entering kindergarten ready to learn, a generation of kids whose third-grade reading scores are indicative of high school graduation.”

And that’s a major need in Adams County, where cheaper housing draws younger and less affluent families, Rothermel said.

Nine percent of children born in Adams County are born to a single mother younger than 25 and with less than a high school diploma. Statewide, an average of 6.4 percent of newborns face those stacked odds, Rothermel said.

“Some families don’t need as much support as other families,” Rothermel said. “There are a lot of children born in our community, and their parents aren’t as set up for success that some other families might be.”